Reflecting, Coaching and Teaching. Linking Theory to Practice with Sport Pedagogy

The aim of this paper is to reflect about the role of sport pedagogy in linking theory to practice. Sport pedagogy tried to go beyond the traditional vision of physical education in favor of a holistic approach to sports education and training that would be able to balance both theoretical-epistemological aspects and practical education in the field of sport, physical education, and physical activity. Even in sport, the myth of technique has produced an excessively mechanistic vision of activities that detriment a cultural and educational point of view. All this has fostered and strengthened the use of professional practices exclusively centered on action, and sports coaches prefer to develop technical knowledge to the detriment of education. It is important, instead, that they learn how to use a variety of educational and didactic models, by calling into question a number of skills and competences that they have to put in practice. It is interesting to decline the Donald Schön perspective within the sports context, which means to consider the sports coaches as reflective practitioners. Sport, physical education, and physical activities can be real positive experiences if they put at the core of the daily practices the educational relationship, in order to design reflexively the sport contexts, always creating different ways to think it trough reflection, coaching, and teaching.